Through economic growth, mergers and acquisitions, business enterprises are becoming ever larger. Further, large business enterprises in the field of high technology now offer ever larger numbers of products and services that derive from an increasingly large variety of technologies.
In this environment, managing the creation, use, protection and maintenance of the company's intellectual assets, such as products and technologies is an acute problem. As an enterprise grows, maintaining consistent usage of names of products and services throughout the enterprise becomes even more challenging. When an enterprise derives its business opportunities from research and development into new technologies or improvements of existing technologies, maintaining consistent usage of technology designations is a challenge, especially when there is disagreement or confusion about the uses, advantages or benefits of a particular technology. Such confusion can arise whether disagreements arise or not, as when there is no adequate or timely communication between different teams within an enterprise.
The World Wide Web is one communication medium that exacerbates the problem, by showing internal information to the enterprise's partners and customers. Large enterprises that own or operate complex Web sites or other network resources that contain product and technology information face a related problem. Specifically, ensuring consistent usage of product names and technology terms across a large, complicated Web site is problematic. A particular problem involves maintaining consistent use of terms when different parts or elements of the Web site applications are created or content is authored by different individuals or groups.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for improved ways to manage one or more vocabularies of all company business practices and pertaining to all business terminology (“concept”), including but not limited to product names and technology terms.
In particular, there is a need for a way to logically structure and correlate stored information about those concepts so that it can be located and navigated easily regardless of who authored the information and where the information physically resides.
There is also a need for a system that can rapidly and efficiently select vocabulary concepts and related information from among a large volume of stored information that is inter-related by overlapping hierarchies, and deliver the selected information to another system for use in assembling electronic documents based on the selected information.
There is also a need for a way to deliver and replicate information distributed over one or more networks that is relevant to a user query based on the vocabulary information to individuals who are distributed among many groups of a large enterprise, or who are outside the enterprise.
There is also need for a logically oriented and related content management and deployment system that is extensible or adaptable when new business practices, products or technologies are developed by diverse, distributed groups in a large business enterprise.